In this episode of the Everything AI in Travel podcast, I speak with Amit Shamni, founder of Bridgify, about building a technology layer for one of travel’s most fragmented categories — tours, activities and experiences — and the journey that ultimately led to Bridgify being acquired by HBX Group.
Amit started with a simple observation: booking flights and hotels online was easy, but finding and booking everything you actually do once you arrive was still incredibly fragmented.
Bridgify set out to fix that.
Today, its technology aggregates and normalizes an enormous range of experiences — from concerts and museums to safaris, scuba diving and tours — and makes that inventory available to businesses such as airlines, OTAs, hotels, credit-card companies and loyalty programs through APIs and white-label solutions.
We dig into:
🚀 How Amit tested the original idea with an app that cost just $1,150 to build
🍕 Why he used pizza, beer and traveller interviews to validate the concept before properly building the company
💰 Why Bridgify deliberately chose B2B2C rather than fighting for consumers directly
🌎 Why the company prioritized global coverage first and margin second
⏳ Why it took around 18 months to make the first dollar — and around three years before transactional revenue really started gaining momentum Pasted text
🧱 How years spent aggregating, cleaning, tagging and normalizing wildly different experience inventory created a significant technology and data moat
🎟️ Why a Taylor Swift concert, Dubai desert safari and Australian scuba dive can require completely different booking architecture
🛒 How Bridgify can potentially put products from multiple suppliers into one cart and one transaction — more like the GDS model created for airlines Pasted text
💳 How Bridgify works with loyalty programs, credit cards and membership businesses to use experiences as both a revenue stream and customer perk
🏨 Why HBX Group became such a natural strategic home for Bridgify — combining Bridgify's development speed and experiences infrastructure with HBX's enormous B2B distribution network
🤝 What the acquisition process looked like and why HBX had actually appeared in Bridgify's potential exit strategy years earlier
And then we get into where things become really interesting: AI and agentic commerce.
Amit believes AI is rapidly destroying some of the traditional technology barriers in travel. Small development teams can now build products that once required enormous engineering organizations.
Bridgify has developed what it calls its Travel Operating System (TOS), incorporating tools including an integration factory, website builder and marketing management system — infrastructure designed to dramatically increase the speed at which new travel products can be built and deployed.
We also discuss what happens when travel moves from humans searching websites to agents transacting with agents.
Bridgify is technically preparing for that world — including MCP connectivity — although Amit believes widespread consumer adoption of truly agentic travel commerce is still likely 18–24 months away.
This is a fascinating founder story about spotting a horribly complicated problem, sticking with it through COVID, war and years of startup uncertainty, building infrastructure rather than another consumer travel app — and eventually finding the strategic partner capable of taking it much further.
#TravelAI #AI #TravelTech #AIAgents #AgenticCommerce #ToursAndActivities #Experiences #TravelStartups #HBXGroup #Bridgify #TravelDistribution #MCP
